As independent agency Claxon enters its seventh year of existence, it’s been anything but a smooth ride for the Gold Coast-based outfit – but founder and CEO Daniel Willis wouldn’t change a thing.
Starting the integrated growth agency in 2017 – he prefers that term over full-service, because the latter “implies a more ‘generalist’ agency”, whereas Claxon’s offering is integrated across its two primary service pillars of media and creative supported by experience in data – came after serving in executive-level positions in the worlds of finance and medical devices, owning a fashion brand and running nightclubs and bars.
Now, at 46, he still doesn’t consider himself an ‘industry guy’ – and admits that he’s “still trying to figure it all out” - but one thing he’s realised is he has both a passion and a skillset for growing companies.
“I'm a creative at heart, but I just can't draw very well; originally, when I was going through school, I wanted to be a graphic designer or an architect, but I guess my outlet for creativity comes not in designing campaigns, but in growing businesses,” he said.
“From the day that we opened our doors, growth has always been the driver and has always been the agenda. Like every business, growth isn't linear. You go through periods of accelerated growth and we've been through periods of contraction as well.”
Over the first four years, Willis said the company grew “pretty rapidly”. With around 30 people as part of the agency, he made the decision to step down from his role as CEO in order to bring in an ‘industry guy’ to lead the firm.
“A lot of the deals that are still done at the bigger end of town are really underpinned by these long held relationships with people that worked together 15 to 20 years ago, and at that time in the journey, we weren't in Sydney or Melbourne and we were a young agency, so I thought bringing somebody in that had that industry gravitas to really drive that growth agenda would be good,” he told AdNews.
“That person came in, hired seven or eight people – all from holdcos - completely rebuilt a brand-new senior leadership team and within just under 12 months, almost put us completely out of business.
“I'm talking about probably a week away from going completely out of business. The new team that came in grew the business to where we were about 50 people strong and it was growth at all costs.”
Due to that unsustainable growth, driven by an attitude that Willis says is prevalent among indies – that you're only as good as how many staff you have – he had to step back in to help lead the business, reducing the headcount from 50 people all the way down to 15 as a result.
Over the past two and a half years, Willis, along with a number of other key senior leaders within the company, have gone on to completely rebuild the agency to a point where now the focus is no longer on ‘more is better’, but ‘better is better’ - less people but better people.
“We’re doing just over four and a half times the revenue that we were doing with 50 people, and we've got around half of that number in terms of team now,” he said.
“It's been a really painful journey, but growth is always a journey.”
Now, the focus is less about growing domestically, but instead setting the sights on global markets.
A prior entry into the US market was hampered by COVID, with the Los Angeles-based office closing eight months after opening, but with three acquisitions under the agency’s belt so far and the due diligence process about to start for an acquisition opportunity in London, Willis is eyeing the UK as a gateway to Europe, hoping to add both a media and creative agency to Claxon in the near future.
“Australia is amazing, but comparatively, it's a really tiny market and the opportunity to work with truly global brands with significantly larger budgets is exciting and appealing to myself, personally, but also to the rest of the senior leadership team that we have,” he said.
Those acquisitions up to this point have come off the back of Claxon’s desire to move to that aforementioned integrated agency model, a positioning borne out of a realisation that after spending the first few years of existence as a pure play performance media agency – handling paid social, paid search and programmatic - a lot of smaller brands are happy to have a performance-only agency, but larger brands don't want to break ‘performance’ out of ‘digital’ or in some cases even break ‘digital’ out of ‘media’.
“I realised that we needed to go on a bit of a transition from that pure performance media agency into an integrated agency model and that integration between media and creative is increasingly important for brands now as they seek to find an agency partner that has a full view of everything from A to Z,” he said.
“We found that that integrated model has won us a significant amount of business, because we can say to a potential client, ‘you may just want us to do the media, but we've got a deep understanding of the creative and how that interacts with media’ or vice versa, which allows us to work with their creative or media agency in a more comprehensive way.
“When we talk to a potential client, we're not talking to them about their marketing or their advertising - we're actually talking to them about their business. We will be talking about their commercial strategy for the year versus their marketing strategy. We say to potential clients: if you want an agency to just help you with your marketing, go somewhere else, but if you want an agency that's going to help you drive commercial growth across your entire business using marketing as the tool, then you need to come to Claxon.”
In 2024, the agency not only saw a strong influx of clients – winning the likes of cosmetic clinics brand Sisu, UK-based health and wellness brand Phizz, luxury fashion brand Oroton, Australian non-profit Serving Our People(via a pro-bono partnership), tattoo brand Celebrity Ink, windows and doors brand Wideline Group and health and wellness supplement company First or Nothing - but also bolstered its offering with the acquisition of Embark, a creative agency also based out of the Gold Coast.
Founded in 2003 by brothers James and Phil Coulson, Embark had previously worked with brands such as Bartercard, BMW, Land Rover and NSW TAFE.
Willis said that in order for the agency to be able to deliver at an exceptional level in the integrated model it set up, acquisition has played an important part, because organic growth and introducing a new capability is harder than people think.
“Our acquisition of Embark was really to provide a robustness to our creative offering, because our offerings are equivalent to stand-alone media or creative agencies - nothing's outsourced and everybody works at Claxon for Claxon at a Claxon office,” he told AdNews.
“Our acquisition of them has elevated our own creative offering in a way that probably would have taken us five years to do ourselves.”
Reflecting on the whirlwind growth journey so far, Willis said that well-run independent agencies with under 20 people on staff can be “really profitable” and can provide the founder “a great lifestyle and a lot of money”, if that's what they're looking for, but the challenge with growth is that it requires money.
“Growth is expensive - it's hard and always takes way longer than anybody thinks,” he said.
“You can get to about 20 to 25 people, just based on having good people doing good work; if you've got a good product and a motivated team, you can get there.
“There's a real sticking point at about 20 to 25 people which requires a fundamental change within the structure of the agency, out of being a startup and into a scaleup. That shift is a shift away from cool people doing cool stuff to systems and processes and strategy and operating rhythms and structure - and then cool people doing cool stuff within that framework.
“Within agency world, not all founders want to go on that journey, because it is a really challenging journey and requires a fundamental shift in thinking and approach.”
Should all indies pursue growth? Willis said it depends - he knows a couple of indie owners that have teams of only five and “they love it, and they have no desire to get bigger”.
“A really good way for indies to grow is to not fall in the trap that many do, and I did, of equating more staff to being a more successful indie,” he said.
“I think that there's a bit of a belief that it's not possible to hire all ‘A players’ - you've got to just take who you can find and try to do the work – but I think that it is possible, if you're disciplined enough, to find genuine ‘A players’ within any role, whether it's an administrator or whether it's an account manager or whether it's an SLT role.
“If indies can focus on hiring great people, it just makes it that much easier to grow.”
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